Page 69 of Broken Country

My sister, Eleanor, has been here in the public gallery every day since the trial first began. She points out the press bench, overflowing with journalists. “Twice as many today, of course,” she whispers, with a quick eye roll.

A man has died. Frank’s brother, Nina’s husband, the boy who once delivered my baby. But you wouldn’t think it to read the endless rash of stories in the press about the “playboy” author Gabriel Wolfe and his love affair with a lowly “farmer’s wife.”

“Mr. Wolfe,” the Crown prosecutor says, “I’d like tobegin at the beginning, if I may? Can you tell me how you first met Beth Johnson?”

I feel, oh, inescapably sad when Gabriel starts to recount our initial meeting. Our trespassing story. Our connection over books and writing. Our mutual boredom, a girl and boy looking to fill a whole summer. The passion that started slowly but soon engulfed us until there was room for nothing and no one else.

“It sounds very powerful the way you describe it. You were in love?”

“We loved each other, yes.”

Gabriel stares back at Donald Glossop, QC, never once dropping his gaze. Gabriel has the clear, well-spoken voice of his kind, unfazed by the scrutiny, a sea of faces turned to examine him. He might be on the witness stand, his private life about to be ripped apart, but they are equals, the barrister and him, that’s what his look says.

“But the relationship ended. Why was that?”

I find myself watching Gabriel intently now, holding my breath as I wait for him to speak.

“It ended for no good reason at all. Miscommunication.”

“A false ending, in a sense?”

Gabriel pauses, as if the words have winded him. “Yes,” he says, quieter now. “That’s exactly right, a false ending.”

“And when you met Beth Johnson again all those years later, you still had feelings for each other?”

I see how Gabriel glances at the dock. He doesn’t know of my daily confessions to Frank in the months before he went to prison. If he was to love me again, I said, then he needed to know everything I had done. There were times he didn’t want to listen and begged me to stop, but I would always carry on in the end. No secrets, we said. Nothing hidden, all of it shared. Frank knows all there is to knowabout Gabriel and me, from our very beginning to our savage end.

Gabriel says: “Deep down, yes. Although neither of us wanted to admit it. Beth was happily married. I knew she loved her husband.”

“And yet, you began an affair with her?”

You can feel it, a new alertness in the gallery—this is what the people came for.

“Yes, I knew it was wrong. And I deeply regret it. But I loved her… I always had.”

I bow my head for a moment, look down at my knees.Oh, Gabriel, I think, as the inevitable sadness rushes through me. There’s no point wishing things had turned out differently, but I do it all the same.

“When did the affair start?”

“Last September. Immediately after Jimmy and Nina Johnson’s wedding.”

Disapproval crackles through the court as this fact sinks in. That we would so callously begin an affair after a joyous family celebration. That the bridegroom would be dead within a week.

“I’d like to move now to September the twenty-eighth of last year. The night of the shooting. Beth Johnson came to your house, I believe, to warn you Jimmy was missing and armed with a shotgun.”

Every minute of this trial matters, it matters so much. Nothing has ever mattered more. So why is it I cannot concentrate on Gabriel’s voice as he begins to tell the court his version of events on that fateful night? I am thinking of all the twenty-eighths of September that had gone before it, days of sunshine, laughter, lovemaking or arguing, milking cows or feeding sheep, cooking, cleaning, changing sheets, days when Bobby was alive and days when hewasn’t, stretches of time that gave no hint of what this date would come to mean. I am thinking of the absurdity of the entire case, that Frank, who loved his brother as much as you could ever love anyone, and then some more, would be accused of killing him. I am thinking the wrong man is in the dock and I should never have allowed it to get this far.

“How did Beth seem when you first saw her?” the prosecutor asks.

“She was worried. Frank had told her Jimmy wanted to punish me for the affair. He was out for blood, she said. I didn’t take it seriously at first. It seemed rather far-fetched. But Beth seemed to think Jimmy might turn up at the house. Within minutes, he did.”

I listen to Gabriel describing his son’s terror when Jimmy fired at the kitchen window. The glass shattering. The three of us screaming in shock. A great gap in the window with my brother-in-law standing just outside it, loading another cartridge into his shotgun.

“Why would you risk going outside? Were you not afraid?” Mr. Glossop asks.

“I wanted to protect my son.” Gabriel lowers his voice. “And Beth. I wanted to keep them safe. I needed Jimmy off the premises. That’s all I was thinking about.”

“I’m skeptical, Mr. Wolfe, as to why Jimmy, who had shot at you through the kitchen window, would happily get into a car with you, meek as a lamb.”

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